Silverlight 1.0 RC released

"Microsoft has announced that Silverlight 1.0 Release Candidate and Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh versions are now available for download. Everyone is encouraged to upgrade immediately to the new versions, as the previous versions will soon expire and cease to work. Developers will also want to check out the Silverlight 1.0 Add-on for Visual Studio 2008 CTP"

Download Silverlight 1.0 Release Candidate
Windows
Mac OS X

For Developers Only: Download Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh
Note: This is a pre-release version of Silverlight that developers may use for evaluation

Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh is intended for developers and designers interested in learning more about how to build experiences with Silverlight using both managed code (C#) and script.
Windows
Mac OS X

MSN Cartoon beta

Thanks to this post from Sukesh, from which i came to know about this cool tool MSN Cartoon (Beta) which creates smileys & cartoons from photos & pictures uploaded by converting them, using facial recognition technology.
After uploading the photo, one can change facial expressions. This can be a very cool feature to get our own caricature, cartoon which can be used in various Live services.

But the main hurdle is , its in Chinese, as its from Microsoft China Development.
But if you are familiar enough with which Windows buttons to click, one can get it working with few tries.
In the end you"ll get a file containing the newly created smiley with your chosen expressions.

It may take a bit of time to understand as its in Chinese.That's why I am yet to try out all options. But to overcome this, Sukesh has put up a video to help it out.

And make sure you are using Internet Explorer 6.0 or above as it may not work with other Browsers.

Windows Home Server

On July, 16th Windows Home Server (WHS) was released to manufacturing. Announcing about this, the WHS team blog says, "Today we are announcing that Windows Home Server has been released to manufacturing (RTM).....I'd like to extend a Big tip-of-the-hat to the enormous passion and contributions from ourbeta testers and community. 100,000+ participants, high volume of forum
discussions, 1 million+ views/month on this blog, etc. all attest to the fact that Windows Home Server addresses a big need out there. The right product at the right time!" That's what GM, Windows Home Server had to say.

Check out these pictures of RTM button-pushing ceremony.Watch the video of RTM button-pushing ceremony, courtesy channel10

The Microsoft Windows Home Server operating system helps you centralize and connect your digital things, enabling you to share, store, access, and automatically protect your most important pictures, videos, music, and files.

WHS provides :

Automated backup and simple restore of your home computers,Access and share everything from anywhere, WHS grows with you to meet your needs, today and into the future.

WHS has been designed with extensibility in mind, so that software developers can develop innovative Add-Ins and there's even code2fame contest.

WHS units are being developed by a number of hardware makers such as Fujitsu-Siemens, Gateway, HP, Iomega, Lacie and Medion.

Check out some of the WHS hardware prototype which comes in various shapes :

hockeypuck - extremely small, extremely cool looking, and extremely round prototype created by Microsoft.

HP's Windows Home Server, the HP MediaSmart Server.Prototypes from Inventec
These prototypes are infact smaller than they look in these pictures.

One can see WHS has immense potential to grow, so we will be hearing a lot about it in the days to come.

To get more information on WHS , Please check,

Windows Home Server web site.

WHS documentation is available, Check out these

Windows Home Server Getting Started Guide

Windows Home Server Reviewer’s Guide

Windows Home Server SDK Documentation

Demo of Windows Live Folders

Since Windows Live Folders is in managed beta and it was open only for limited time, for limited people, many of you might be very eager to know what this cool service is all about?
You might have already read my short review posted earlier.

And its going to be broadened as it develops. Already many of the suggestions being put by beta testers are being considered and new features being added. You can check for the updates at the official Windows Live Folders Blog, where your comments can also be given. While the actual site is Windows Live Folders beta.

And now a video is also available, courtesy channel 10, giving a demo of what Windows Live Folders is all about, explained by the Windows Live Folders team itself. Direct link to video.

Check out the cool video about the cool Windows Live Folders !!

Webcasts on SQL Server 2005 and Windows Vista

Forthcoming Webcasts on Microsoft TechNet - July '07

So Join the upcoming LIVE Webcasts Sessions and hone your way to the top. Click on the Subject or the 'Register Now' Button to register.

Date	Time	Series	Subject	Speaker
16th July 2007	2:00 PM - 3:30 PM	SQL	Upgrading from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005	Vinod Kumar
17th July 2007	2:00 PM - 3:30 PM	SQL	SQL Server 2005: Query processing basics	Vinod Kumar
18th July 2007	2:00 PM - 3:30 PM	SQL	SQL Server 2005 – T-SQL Basics	Vinod Kumar
18th July 2007	11:00 AM - 12:30 PM	Windows Vista	Overview of Windows Vista	Sudhir B. Rao
26th July 2007	2:00 PM - 3:30 PM	Windows Vista	Windows Vista Deployment - Real World Case Study	Karthikeyan Krishnan

Channel9 , Channel10 and Now Channel 8

Coming Soon !! Channel 8
http://channel8.msdn.com/
Microsoft is readying a new channel, Channel8 after Channel9 and Channel10
(Can also check Channel9 and 10 from my favorite links list provided on the blog)
Mark Johnston, Microsoft Developer blogged

"It's going to be funky with a logo like that! And you can probably guess who it's targeted at given my new job focusing on students ;-) "

So let us wait and watch .

Update : At present it seems to be taken off the web. Getting "You are not authorized to view this page".
Update 21 July '07: Channel 8 is up and running, almost. Check out !

Silverlight Apps and Games List

Silverlight is spreading and becoming more and more popular. Now even games have been written based on Silverlight. I came across this post from Tim Sneath, From A to Z... 50 Silverlight Applications. And also a post from Chris Bowen, Index of Silverlight Games (Most with Source) . So from there I have put all the links of Silverlight games and their source code wherever available and other Silverlight apps. If you have not installed Silverlight, install it first Windows Ver. / Mac ver.

2D Physics Simulation Grand Piano [Source] Silverlight Mind Map	3D Teapot Demo Infragistics Controls Demo Silverlight Pad
Amazon Search Visualization JavaScript / .NET Chess Silverlight Playground	AOL Social Mail Gadget Laugh-o-Sphere Silverlight Rocks
Binary Clock LiveStation SilverNibbles [Source]	Browser Poker Matrix Digital Rain Smalltalk on Silverlight
Bubble Factory Michael's Journal Sprawl [Source]	Bubblemark Office Ribbon Surface Prototype
Comic Book Viewer Photopoints Gallery SVG to Silverlight Converter	Destroy All Invaders [Source] Popfly Telerik RadControls 3D Cube
Digger [Source] Python Console Verlet Integration Algorithm	Disco Dance Floor Reflecting Graph Windows Journal-to-Silverlight Converter
Dr Greenthumb Reflector for Silverlight Windows Vista Simulator	Dr Popper [Source] Roxio Buzz XamlWebPad
GlyphMap Sierpinski Triangle XPS Viewer	GOA WinForms Demo Silverlight Airlines Demo Zero Gravity
Gradient Animations Silverlight Chess Game Replay	Chess [Source]
Silverlight Maze	Khet
Silverlights out [Source]

Update 22 July '07 : Came across Silverlight Tetris game and its Source code.
(Thanks to frankarr)

Some of the Silverlight stuff posted above may not work with Silverlight RC, if you have installed the RC unless those apps have been updated for RC.

Update 1 Aug '07 : Richard Z's Jelly sample graphs in various styles, bar, pie chart etc. based on Silverlight. This has been updated to work with Silverlight RC also. Check out these cool graphs samples. Source code here .


Also you can check out this video which shows, talk with Creators of First Non-MS Silverlight game called Zero Gravity.

Zero Gravity: Silverlight based puzzle game , where they talk about the game, its various levels and also talk of releasing the source code at some point of time.

Hope you have great time trying out these amazing applications and games which I must warn you, some are addictive.

Disclaimer : As there are many links provided from different sources, at some point of time, some links may be broken.

Thanks to Tim Sneath and Chris Bowen for providing such a nice collection. I'll try to update whenever possible.

FeedBurner for all

Feedburner's once paid features have been opened up for all as free features as per their Official Blog.
Feedburner stats PRO has become free and so is the MyBrand Premium service.

This is what Official FeedBurner Blog said:

"PRO is feed analytics taken to the next level. You will now have access to the number of people who have viewed or clicked individual content items in your feed and “Reach,” which estimates the daily number of subscribers who interacted with your feed content. You can turn this on by signing in to your account, navigating to the Analyze tab and heading to the FeedBurner Stats PRO section. Click the "Item Views" checkbox to activate these PRO features."

"The MyBrand service (also PRO-level) is located under the "My Account" tab after you've signed in. MyBrand lets you maintain consistency between your feed address and your hosted website's domain, if matchy-matchy is your thing. For example, rather than using feeds.feedburner.com/MyFeedName, your MyBrand-ed feed address can be feeds.myexcellentdomain.net/MyFeedName. To get started with MyBrand, sign into FeedBurner, click the "My Account" link in the upper left-hand corner, and then click "MyBrand". Nota Bene: You must be comfortable playing around with DNS entries and own the rights to the domain whose DNS entries you'll be playing around with in order to successfully activate MyBrand."

Users of Feedburner now can make use of these services without any charge. So after taken over by Google, these PRO service have been offered as Free.

MSDN Bot

Few days back i had posted about Encarta Instant Answers , an Encarta bot for your Messenger , bringing Encarta right into your IM, today i came across another cool Bot for MSDN, thanks to Vinod Kumar.
Just add MSDNBuddy [at] hotmail [DOT] com to messenger contact list and get started with IM. You can get all your search query from MSDN right into your messenger.

Windows Live Folders and Windows Live Photo Gallery beta

Windows Live Folders and Windows Live Photo Gallery are now in limited managed betas, and as I received the invite, I was trying out these cool services.
I started with getting into Live Folders first, because the invite said there was limited availability for Windows Live Folders and sign up was available only for few hours on 27th June. Luckily I could sign up without any problem.

Windows Live Folders was already in the news , when it briefly popped up earlier in the Month of May. Its an online file storage service which provides 500MB of free online storage with 50MB individual upload file size limit and can be accessed from any computer with Internet access. You can create personal folders, shared folders and Public folders and can control the access to each folder.

And ones personal folders are protected with his Live id and the folders that are shared has to be accessed with their Live id who wants to access it.

Using Shared folders one can easily collaborate with coworkers, and we can decide how much control each person has over each shared folder. Some can just read while others can add and delete files.

With public folders, anyone on the Internet can view your files, but they can't change it. Each folder and file has its own web address.

Overall its a nice service and will be fully utilised by its users as its very useful. And it may be provided with more features in future. Some of them which I may like to see are thumbnail view of uploaded picture files, ability to sync Live folders with local folders, integration with Windows desktop and also facility to save Office documents directly to Live folders, so an addon for office for implementing this feature can be provided.

Now coming to the next cool thing, Windows Live Photo Gallery which users of Vista may already be familiar with, is provided with some more features. WL PhotoGallery beta can also be installed on Windows XP SP2.

Also image editing features are vastly improved with features like Panoramic stitch, histogram. There's also improved tagging and organising. One can publish the Photos directly to Windows Live Spaces.


Also the Photo Import tool has been improved a lot, which now groups all photos taken from digital camera by date and time. This is very convenient.

After installing on XP machine, one can see that Movie maker integration as seen in Photo Gallery installed on Vista is not present, so Make movie option is not present for the XP version.

The option of "Create Panoramic Stitch..." provided which as the name suggests stitches overlapping photos to create a single stitched photo. Useful for creating long panoramic view such as city's skyline which can not be captured in single shot. And this option many of you using Digital cameras might have come across in the Software provided with the cameras. Anyway when I tried this option from Photo gallery, it did an amazingly near perfect job creating a stitched photo. This can also be used for creating sort of 360 deg. view of a Hall/room with some effort. So a very nice addition.

So I could say the new Windows Live Photo gallery provides lots of options for managing and fixing your Photos and options which you may not find in basic image editor. One can expect some more refinement of features in the future.